Glimpses into the Great Beyond?

Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) have gripped the public imagination ever since Raymond Moody’s watershed book Life After Life brought them to widespread attention in 1975. These experiences are commonly reported to involve the sensation of leaving one’s body and watching efforts by medical personnel at resuscitation or even events further afield, as well as experiences of passing through a tunnel towards a being of light and love and meeting deceased friends and relatives. Such experiences are sometimes alleged to constitute evidence for an afterlife, but exactly how they do so is seldom spelled out precisely. The aim of this paper, then, is to carefully consider three different inferential pathways from data about NDEs to the conclusion that there is an afterlife. I shall argue that at least two of them provide moderately strong support to this conclusion.